Do you want to take a break from hosting content on your website? Or, are you a freelancer who’s looking to build a strong portfolio? By now, you might have learned how guest blogging can assist you in achieving your goals. In this post, we shall guide you on how to do guest blogging correctly.
However, first, what is guest blogging?
One thing that makes guest blogging so famous is the win-win results it presents for the parties involved. However, how can you define guest blogging? This is the process of developing written content for other websites, apart from your own website.
How can you find the best guest blogging opportunities?
- By searching specific industry blogs
- Reaching out to other content marketing teams
- Searching for social media opportunities
- Using SEO tools to find the platforms where your competitors are guest blogging
- Reaching out to blogs and asking for guest blogging opportunities
- Searching “guest blogging opportunities” on Google
- Using your existing relationships to get guest blogging opportunities
Companies that have guest-blogging programs use the method to increase their content, build connections, and tap into the leaders of the industry. The benefits you get when you start guest blogging include increasing your brand authority, getting backlinks to your content, as well as being exposed to new content.
People who have never written a guest blog before always find it a challenge to start guest blogging. Since there is a lot of content out there, it’s usually time-consuming to find the right opportunities to target. In this post, we shall also give you the tips that can assist you in finding the right and best guest blogging opportunities. However, you will need to note that it will not be enough to find these opportunities. The competition out there for guest blogging is fierce, and this means you have to be unique if you want to beat the competition.
Perfecting your guest-blogging pitch
The greatest challenge of securing a guest blogging opportunity is having your content chosen. Most of the popular guest blogging sites usually receive a lot of emails every day—each requesting an opportunity to post on their site. Therefore, you will need to learn the best practices that will make you stand out from the competition and get your emails to read and approved.
Important things to include in your guest blogging pitch emails:
- A personalized introduction—it should indicate that you have done your research well
- Introduction—about yourself, the topic, the company, and why you believe you are an expert
- Different article ideas (3-5) that are in line with the company’s brand
- This is optional—if your company provides a guest blogging platform, you can offer a guest blogging exchange.
Even though these tips might appear to be simple and straightforward, they will make your guest blogging pitch better. Always take time to create individual pitches, as this shows that you want to add value to the company’s blog and that you are not just searching for an opportunity.
The Following Are 10 Guest Blogging Tips
When your pitch gets approved, you need to start writing. In case you are guest blogging for another company, you should make sure that your writing skills are refined. However, you need to note that guest blogging requires a unique form of content, which needs special care. These tips will assist you to create the best content.
Understand Your Audience
When creating your content, ensure that you have your audience in mind. Even though this might not be an issue when writing for your own site, always make sure that you put this in mind when guest blogging. It’s always a good thing to take your time to look at the content published on the site you want to write for, as this will assist you in understanding their target audience.
Customize Your Content
Once you have a better understanding of the website’s target audience, it’s time now you customize your content. Make sure that you read several posts on the website and then match the tone and writing style with your own content.
The following tips will assist you to perfect your writing tone:
- Use writing tools like Grammarly in order to improve the formatting and style of your writing
- Avoid off-topic tangents and concentrate on the theme
- Write in your unique voice—whenever you can
- Write in a descriptive storytelling style as this shows the reader what you want to convey
- Find and remove the words and phrases that you’ve over used
Always create content to match the tone of the blog you are pitching for. This assists in ensuring that every piece you write fits into the website’s brand identity.
Avoid Overdoing The Links
One of the greatest benefits of guest blogging is getting backlinks to your own content. Even though many people are tempted to stuff many keywords in their content, ensure that you avoid this at all costs. Link-stuffing usually reduces the SEO value of your content. In addition to that, it can also annoy the people you are writing for.
Here are three major best-practices of linking your own content when guest blogging:
- Always check the link policies in the guest blogging guidelines
- Never add more than 2 or 3 self-promoting links
- Never add links to product or sales pages
Capitalize On Branded Images
As you know, linking to your own content helps in driving traffic towards your content—however, did you know that there are other methods that you can use to add your brand into a guest post as you still add value to your content?
Branded images are a good way to do that. These images give you the best way to break-up your text, give it the much needed white space as you promote your brand. In addition, branded images also save a lot of time for the people you are writing for, and also creates a unique asset for the team.
In addition to that, branded images also rank well on Google, under Google’s image search feature, and this is separate from how your content ranks in search engine result pages. If your images start ranking in Google Image Search, they will also start driving traffic to your content.
Create a Series of Topics Before You Start Pitching
If you want to start and build a strong relationship with a particular company, guest blogging is a great way to start. And, one amazing way to strengthen that relationship is to pitch your topics as a series for that website.
For example, you can create a pitch series in this manner:
- Guest post 1 – what is SEO
- Guest post 2 – why is SEO important
- Guest Post 3 – how to create a successful SEO campaign
Doing do will guarantee a number of content pieces for the website you are pitching for, and will also give you an opportunity to write several articles. This is an amazing way to brand yourself as a resourceful leader and also to develop a personal brand.
Don’t Forget the Basics
There is nothing discouraging as submitting a guest blog—only to realize that the content is full of spelling and grammatical errors. When you fail to concentrate on your editing skills, you can create good content, but make it look like it was written by an amateur. Therefore, you should ensure that you use tools like Grammarly to correct all the errors in your content before submitting it.
Never Pitch the Same Content to Different Sites
One greatest mistake that many people make is to pitch the same content to different websites. When you are caught doing this, you risk damaging your credibility—which can, in turn, make you lose precious opportunities. If you are new in guest blogging, you should note that repurposing your content is plagiarism.
Yes—this is very true. It’s known as self-plagiarism, and it can cause you a lot of problems. This is the same way you cannot use the same college term paper for several assignments. Therefore, you need to understand that you CANNOT repost your content to other websites. Every guest blog you write must be unique.
Use Data to Support Your Content
One way to make yourself look like an expert to include data and quotes from other experts. When creating content for guest blogging, it should be a mix of your ideas, interlinked with industry statistics, studies, data, and more. This can make your content appear less self-promotional while giving the audience more added resources.
This is ideal for social media outreach once your post goes live. You can share this post, and then tag the industry experts you have quoted in your content. As a result, you will end up increasing the chances of your content being shared. You can capitalize on these connections to build new relationships and even new opportunities for guest posts.
Format Your Content
There is one simple tip that can make you earn more connections in the guest blogging industry:
Before writing your article, just visit the website you are writing for and see how the writers format their articles. See if they follow any structure and whether they use featured snippets. How are their headers structured? Now, create your content following this format as it makes things easier, and also reduces the time between editing and publishing.
Add Value to Your Content
The last tip you can use when developing a guest blogging strategy is adding value for your partner’s content. It’s important to note that guest blogging is a two-way thing—which means you have to show your value. There are several ways for you to do this:
Ways to add value to your guest blogs:
- Connect the content from the host’s site with your own content
- Create an extra piece of content or a downloadable asset
- Use unique or original data for the content
- Let them decide about the final CTA
This is more of a scratch my back scratch yours. Doing that eliminates most of the work that the people you are writing for has to do just to make you look like a professional.
Bottom Line
What you need to understand is—this is all about making everything look easy. These tips will help you to reduce the number of edits that should be done on your post, and also reduce the time between your pitching and publishing. Doing all this before posting your content will save you from the trouble of having to fix things after you have already submitted your content.